Benjamin C. Jarvis was a legend in the submarine service in World War II, receiving the Navy Cross for "extraordinary heroism" for taking on Japanese gunboats and sinking an enemy convoy during surface attacks in 1945.

A tall, powerfully built man whose crew referred to him as "Big Ben," Capt. Jarvis died at his home in Fairfield on Feb. 22 at age 91. He was one of the last surviving submarine skippers from the war. The cause of death, his family said, was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Capt. Jarvis was a member of a family that traced its roots back to an ancestor who landed in Virginia in 1657, and he was also related to George Washington, his family said.

He began life on a farm in Arkansas, where his family owned cotton plantations. He was inspired to join the Navy by Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the famous Antarctic explorer who was his father's college roommate.

The young Jarvis went to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., where he played on the football team and earned honors as commander of the cadet color company. He graduated in 1939 as a commissioned officer.

He was posted to the Atlantic fleet as a gunnery officer aboard the battleship Idaho, but he was drawn to the submarine service and was selected for the Navy's submarine school in New London, Conn.

He made 14 wartime patrols - three as commanding officer of the submarine Baya. The Baya had a fine reputation, according to Eugene Conrad, an enlisted man whose war recollections are posted on the Internet.

In the spring of 1945, the Baya, then operating in the shallow waters off Thailand and what was then French Indochina, made a surface attack on a convoy protected by two enemy gunboats.

The Baya's first attack was beaten back by the enemy warships. The Japanese came so close that the Americans could see the individual Japanese firing away and machine-gun bullets ricocheted off the Baya's conning tower.

Another submarine attacked the convoy the next day, but was lost with all hands. Capt. Jarvis brought his boat back in another attack at close quarters and again was driven off again. The next week, however, he found a convoy of four ships - also protected by a gunboat escort - and sank them all, according to war records.

All three of these operations were daring. The water was only 42 feet deep, too shallow to submerge, and Capt. Jarvis made all his attacks on the surface with few options to escape. The citation accompanying the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest award for valor, called the action "one of the outstanding attacks of this war." It was "beautifully executed," the citation read, and Capt. Jarvis "distinguished himself in keeping with the highest traditions of the Navy."

After the war, he stayed in the Navy and served as commanding officer of submarines and surface ships, as well as staff officer duties. He also served on special missions with the British, Belgian, Danish, Dutch, French, Turkish, Peruvian and Japanese navies. He retired after 34 years of naval service with the rank of captain in 1968. He worked as an executive for Campbell Industries in San Diego for 11 years after that.

He then lived in Sonoma and Fairfield, often giving lectures on his wartime service.

He is survived by his daughter, Sharon, of Stockton; two sons, Whitby of Castro Valley and Benjamin of Mountain View; and by five grandchildren.

His wife, Cecilia, died in 2002; they had been married 62 years.

Capt. Jarvis requested that no services be held. The family prefers memorial donations be made to the American Cancer Society.